Monday, 16 June 2025

Shortlisted

 It just goes to show how terrible I am at social media and self-promotion more generally that I haven't got round to updating this blog with my latest piece of news. Anyway, The Unrecovered has been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize, which will be judged on 12th September in Stirling.

Bloody Scotland is a literary festival specifically for crime fiction. I was interviewed on their podcast when the novel first came out (I wrote about it here), and although I wasn't sure if my book strictly counted as crime, it certainly counts as a literary mystery. I'll be on a panel with the other shortlisted authors (David Goodman, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Claire Wilson) on the 12th, just before the prize announcement.

I'll also be appearing on a panel on the 14th September, with Sarah Hornsley and David Reynolds, entitled 'Gamekeepers Turned Poachers', looking at the experience of writers who have worked in other parts of the publishing industry:


I was in Stirling last Thursday for the launch of the programme, and was interviewed alongside the other shortlistees in the Courier:



There should be another couple of podcast interviews lined up with me and the other shortlisted authors over the next few weeks. I'll add the details here when I can.

I have an odd relationship with Stirling, on the whole. I was born there, but only lived there for my first 20 months or so, before my family moved to Trinidad for the next four years. For a couple of years, roughly 2000 - 2002, I lived down the road in Larbert and would head into the town regularly (because there was absolutely nothing to do in Larbert). Then, in the sceond half of 2004, I lived on my own in a poky flat on Cowane Street while working at the Waterstones in the Thistle Centre, before moving to Dumfries for a while. And now its the scene of The Unrecovered's first shortlisting for anything, so hopefully all these earlier attachments and associations bring me luck on the night.


Monday, 2 June 2025

Summer plans, proofs, genre

 The copy edits on the second novel* are done and have been sent back to Bloomsbury, and the next stage is to await the proofs for a last check-through before the book goes into production. Did I say a last check-through? Of course not; there will inevitably be half a dozen other chances to drag my resisting eyes through the text, cringing at every single word, until the book is actually published. I found with The Unrecovered that there was a strange cooling-off period lasting two months or so after the novel came out. During that time I absolutely hated the thing, and it was only after I had some distance from it that I could look on it with even the vaguest equanimity. I'm hoping that period is a bit more condensed this time round. This second novel was much harder to write and involved a lot more research, but going through the copy edits made me feel that I might actually have got close to what I was trying to achieve. It'll be interesting to see if that holds up when I look through the proofs.

I've also finished the very rough first draft of a third novel, the last part of my tentatively connected, thematically linked trilogy (which isn't a trilogy) about war, history and trauma, filtered through the lens of the supernatural. If The Unrecovered hints towards the gothic mystery, the second novel is going to be a sort-of ghost story, while this third novel hints towards cosmic horror. All three of these books are attempting to make their metaphors concrete; to use what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called 'the mask of genre'**, employing the fantastical to decipher and renew a shop-worn reality. As is my usual practice, I've printed out the typescript of this third book and will spend the summer carving it down and refining it as much as possible before sending it on to my agent in the autumn.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the year, unless it's tinker away at this third book until it's ready to submit. I've got plenty of ideas for a possible next novel, but it might be wiser to step away from the notebook for the time being. If you have a general facility for writing, there is such a thing as writing too much after all...

* Such is the opacity of publishing, I've no idea whether the title and plot of this second novel is a closely-guarded industry secret, but I'll keep everything unnamed for the moment.

** I cannot find the reference for this quote anywhere, but I'm sure del Toro said it. It probably comes from his superb book Cabinet of Curiosities.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Copy-editing

 I am currently working through the copy edits on my second novel. Copy-editing (or should that be 'copy editing'?) is the most mysterious and most mundane part of the book-wrangling process, and the last piece of the puzzle before the text is sent off to be typeset. It's where the copy editor makes you look good, by picking up on and correcting typos, childish misspellings, clumsy grammar and/or general infelicities, and ensuring the whole internal cohesion of the book, so that Mondays aren't followed by Wednesdays, or characters with brown hair don't suddenly have black hair a hundred pages later. Those are the mundane parts (and like most mundane things, essential).

The mysterious part comes from the sense of another creative intelligence looking over your text and, very subtly, saying something like: Hmm... Well I wouldn't have done it quite like that... 

A good copy editor is worth their weight in gold, and after my experience on The Unrecovered I'm pretty sure I've got a very good one. She's saved me from all sorts of minor mistakes, but there's still that wry sense of challenge whenever a word has been quietly replaced with something a little smoother. Sometimes the suggestion is a very good one, sometimes I'd prefer my original choice, and sometimes I really do want a comma there. I like this though. It forces you to look at things anew, and weigh up your choices once you've got a bit of distance from them. Going through the copy edits can be tedious in the extreme but, like everything in the publishing business, it really is in service of the quality of the book. It's the stage after this - going through the proofs - that's the real killer...

Friday, 11 April 2025

Events and interviews

 I've had a handful of events and interviews over the last couple of weeks, all of which went far better than I feared. I'm not a natural performer by any stretch of the imagination, but I found myself really enjoying these.

First of all, an interview with the new Bloody Scotland podcast, which can be found wherever you get your podcasts etc.

Bloody Scotland has been flying the flag for Scottish crime fiction for a number of years, and I was initially unsure why I'd been asked to talk to them. The Unrecovered might be many things (a new Scottish classic according to some discerning readers; a load of boring rubbish according to other, less discerning readers...) but it's definitely not a crime novel. However, there's certainly a mystery element to the story, one based in myth, legend and landscape rather than human action, and there's a reasonable amount of blood. It feels like Bloody Scotland are expanding their remit to cover this kind of fiction as well, and talking with Bob McDevitt and Lin Anderson (a celebrated crime author herself) made for a really interesting chat. As I reminded him, Bob used to work with my mum in the now-defunct branch of Waterstones at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh, all the way back in the 1990s. The world of writing and publishing, especially in Scotland, is exceptionally small ... 

Next was an event with the Far From the Madding Crowd bookshop in Linlithgow, which took place at the beautiful St Peter's Church on the High Street.

The sermon about to begin...

There was a good crowd of around 20 people and it was chaired by Sally, the manager. This was a really rewarding conversation, especially as I got to delve into my process a bit, and the questions at the end were great. There's nothing better than when an astute reader notices something in your novel that has escaped your own attention - it makes the whole process feel incredibly mysterious, and that you've been accessing levels you didn't consciously understand when writing it. And the setting for this event was just gorgeous, one of the most beautiful little churches I've ever seen.

Finally, a bigger event in East Linton hosted by Night Owl Books, and chaired by the manager Rebecca.

The crowd begins to gather...


Well over 30 people came to this, and it never ceases to amaze me that people would be willing to give up their time to come and hear me ramble on about my book. Again, the converstation was wide-ranging, I got to really dig into aspects of the novel and the whole journey to publication, and the questions at the end were great. I signed loads of books afterwards, including from someone who had already read the novel twice (!) and who said it was inspiring them to write their own fiction. That is high praise indeed, and really humbling. This was a great event, and Rebecca is to be commended for running these so well.

I don't have anything else lined up events-wise at the moment. I was hoping to get offered something from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but given their funding woes I think I might have to wait for next year. In any case, I've surprised myself by enjoying these, once the initial nerves are overcome. In the run-up to the book launch in February I would idly daydream about changing my name and getting a job in the Hebrides on a fishing trawler rather than go through the nightmare terror of a public speaking event, but once they're underway they can be incredibly rewarding. It turns out I might be a secret egomaniac, and I quite like having a captive audience forced to listen to me wax lyrical about my own work. Who would have thought?


Friday, 21 March 2025

But Who is Stronger Than Death? Ted Hughes, evidently.

 


This hardback edition of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes is my most treasured possession. I was given it as a leaving present by my friends and colleagues at the Notting Hill branch of Waterstones in London, all the way back in October 2003. I’d worked there for only a year or so, but it was the among the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it was a sad day when I learned recently that the branch is now defunct.




 As can be seen above, everyone signed the endpapers for me, and to this day I can remember them all exactly. One of the many drawbacks of moving around a lot when you’re younger is that you end to replace one group of friends with another, and it becomes harder to stay in touch with the people you leave behind. Anyway, to Ian, Gilles, Mette, Serene, Freddie and (especially) Kirstin – I hope you’re all doing well, wherever you are.

This collected volume had just been published that year, and although I’d been a Ted Hughes obsessive for about a decade there was much in it that I hadn’t read before. I can’t remember the exact moment I became aware of Hughes, but it was almost certainly through reading Sylvia Plath when I was a teenager. (Although now I think of it, I had read his superb children’s book The Iron Man when I was about seven, so Hughes is probably the writer with whom I’ve had the longest relationship.) There’s an inevitable, prurient fascination in the darkness and tragedy that surrounds Hughes’s life, and we may as well get it out of the way here. As everyone knows, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and Hughes was blamed for it for decades. His lover Assia Wevill then committed suicide in 1969, in identical circumstances to Plath, killing their four year-old daughter Shura before taking her own life. The idea that Hughes was some patriarchal monster forcing these women to kill themselves was common currency in some critical circles for decades, but I think it was definitively cut off by the publication of his late collection Birthday Letters in 1998, and by the publication of his selected letters in 2007. All of the above is biography and gossip, not literature, although it’s clear the colossal emotional pain Hughes suffered from these tragedies fed into his darkest writings in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Seamus Heaney called Hughes ‘a guardian spirit of the land and the language,’ a poet who ‘internalised the historical crises of the British nation and the ecological crises of planet earth’, and it was this completeness of poetic vision that first drew me to his work; his vivid strangeness, the perspective on the natural world that was somehow both tender and fierce, alive to violence and death at the same time as seeing those struggles as inherent and valuable parts of a greater and eternal whole. I suspect most readers of Hughes find initial value in his animal poems and his poetry of the natural world, the early lyrics from his first collections The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. Poems like the much-anthologised ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Jaguar’, or ‘Pike’ and ‘Wind’ show this early gift for embodiment and a richly unsentimental sympathy. Sometimes it feels as if this perspective is more empathetic than sympathetic, as though it’s coming from within the natural world rather than being imposed on it from outside. Alice Oswald, the clearest inheritor of Hughes’s mantle, describes him as less of a natural poet than a preternatural one, his animals emerging from some dark, metamorphic space, changed by his knowledge of the deep roots of mythology and folklore. The startling adjectives and adverbs imbue these creatures with shocking strangeness; they are estranged from our common, desultory understanding of them. The jaguar in his cage ‘[…] hurrying enraged/Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes/On a short fierce fuse’. A sparrow ‘whets his stub weapon’ on a branch in ‘Sunday Evening’, and in ‘Thrushes’ the birds seem less like humble garden visitors than heralds of cataclysm: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,/More coiled steel than living’.

It would be a mistake to see the Hughesian eye in this period turned only to the animal life that surrounded him though. Contemporary politics was of no interest, but Hughes had an unusually intense identification with the bloody horrors and sacrifices of the First World War, which puts him in much closer communion with the war poets Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones and Robert Graves (especially the last two) than you might think. Hughes’s father and uncle were both veterans of that war, and he often spoke of how the Yorkshire valleys where he grew up, well into the 1950s, still seemed in deep mourning for the local boys who had been killed. Poems like ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Six Young Men’ are superb imaginative engagements with battle and human suffering, exploring with anger and compassion the experiences of men like his father.

The prevalence of mythology and folklore in Hughes’s poetry began to intensify into the late 1960s. His 1967 collection Wodwo initialled the change, a combination of poetry and short stories that seems formally inventive for the period. (‘Rain Horse’, later reprinted in the story collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom, is one of the best short stories ever written.) It was 1970’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow that solidified Hughes’s deepening and incredibly dark obsession with the lineaments of folk tales and myth, something that continued for much of the decade that followed. The sequence is an unstable text, with Hughes adding and subtracting individual poems from it, hiving some of them off to other collections, or keeping handfuls sequestered in either limited edition pamphlets or uncollected altogether. It was intended to be an epic folk-tale, with Crow as a trickster figure, cowardly and selfish, created by God in some horrified impulse; ‘a black rainbow/Bent in emptiness’, ‘Screaming for Blood/Grubs, crusts/Anything’. Creation itself is a horror, a roiling arena of sexual depravity and bloodshed, investigated by Crow in all his mocking curiosity. This solidification (some would say ossification) of Hughes’s interests and themes  from a natural to a mythological world has an attendant loosening of form. The Crow poems are not so much free verse as a destruction of poetic form and a rough stitching of it back together, in lines and stanzas of savage violence, black irony and bitter sarcasm. The poems are difficult, ugly in places, thrilling, disturbing – ripe for parody in many ways, as only the most stylistically distinct work can be. Hughes was to stick with this more abrasive style in works like Cave Birds, inspired by the grotesque, caricatural work of his friend, the artist Leonard Baskin, and in what might be the strangest book ever written; 1977’s Gaudete. A loosely versified narrative, Gaudete recounts the abduction of an Anglican clergyman into the underworld and his replacement by a duplicate changeling crafted from a rotten tree stump, who then goes on to minister to his parishioners in a distinctly sexual manner. To say that by this point we’re a far cry from the intimate natural histories of The Hawk in the Rain would be something of an understatement.

Hughes’s work slowly returned to a richer and more intimate engagement with his subjects though, the apocalyptic and alchemical interests becoming more restrained (as in his 1989 collection Wolfwatching), and the natural world explored and recreated through more a tender, caressing observation. ‘A Cranefly in September’ is a work of both intimately close detail and visionary transformation, the titular insect ‘blundering with long strides, long reachings’ as it traverses a patch of grass, the poet’s eye imbuing it with a greater valence as he notes ‘Her jointed bamboo fuselage’ and ‘the simple colourless church windows of her wings’. In the end, after adorning the insect with a kaleidoscope of similes and images, and personalising it as ‘her’, the cranefly must also be seen as an evolved creature of matter and chemicals fulfilling its instinctual function: ‘The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate/To plot her through the infinities of the stems.’

Remains of Elmet and River return Hughes to the landscapes of his childhood, while Season Songs, a collection written ‘in hearing’ of children, and Moortown Diary reflect his growing involvement with farming and agriculture. Moortown Diary is surely one of the greatest collections about man’s engagement with the land ever written, an intimate portrait of the bloody realities of farming life that nevertheless finds a strange calm and equipoise in the rough business of dehorning cattle, shearing sheep, and overseeing the birth of calves, ‘Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb’. It is about man’s often vexed relationship not with landscape, but the land; a needed thing, obdurate and stubborn, a dishcloth that must be wrung out for the very last drop of human sustenance.

This balance and contrast between the shamanic Hughes and the Wordsworthian keeper of the land meant that he is probably the only major poet since Tennyson to have made a success of the Laureateship, when he was appointed in 1984. He spoke of the position in explicitly shamanic terms; if the crown is the symbol of the unity of the tribe, then the Laureate can represent and give voice to the spiritual unity of that tribe. Unpromising occasions like the christening of Prince Harry produced poems like ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, a rushing, water-soaked work that flows through the rivers and streams that pour across Devon, an incantatory roll-call of river names that seems to make an implicit, Arthurian connection between the fertility of the crown and the fertility of the land. In a letter from 1979, Hughes noted that all creative work to him was ‘a conjuration, a ritual summoning of all energies associated with the subject matter’.

Two more great works were to follow before his death in 1998. The nourishing, imaginative topography of myth hadn’t left him, and in Tales From Ovid Hughes turned to one of the original sources, adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rich, indecorous poems of an overwhelming blank verse that feels hewn out of stone. Here capricious gods wield infinite power, the transformations of man to animal a metamorphosis of unrivalled horror. Even Martin Amis (a natural Philip Larkin man more than a Ted Hughes man) called the book ‘masterful.’ It was 1998’s Birthday Letters though that sealed the poetic career and capped this later flowering of genius. It was the first time he had engaged in his work with the suicide of Sylvia Plath, and it was clear from this collection of stunned conversations, unflinching and interrogatory, that he had been working on it since her death in 1963. The book was a colossal bestseller, but even if people were reading it for prurient reasons they could not have been unaffected by the emotional power of Hughes’s verse. It won every prize going, and as if to underline its significance as his last word on the matter, he died of cancer only nine months later. Typically, he suspected he had contracted the disease because he had spent too much time writing prose, instead of poetry.

Of all his works Birthday Letters has the most emotional resonance for me. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the shallow, tote-bag slogan idea that literature can be ‘healing’, or that it has some magical analgesic effect (as if a d headache can be shifted by a dose of Shakespeare instead of two paracetamol and a glass of water), but Birthday Letters was one of the only books I could read in the aftermath of my mother’s death in 2012. I would get up early every day that summer and sit in the garden at my father’s house, drinking a coffee and reading and re-reading this book, unable to let it go. It was an anchor in many ways, a lifejacket. It felt like Hughes was invocating his grief directly into my heart, and that this shared sorrow was somehow both deepening my own grief and making it more bearable. The poems are concentrated moments, flickers of disbelief and understanding, roving attempts to find meaning in detail and significance in the half-remembered and the painfully exact. The language is sometimes plain, sometimes achingly beautiful. On his first meeting with Plath, in ‘St Botolph’s’, accompanied by another lover: ‘Falcon Yard:/Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow’, or in the starkly titled ‘Error’: ‘I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland./I sleepwalked you/Into my land of totems.’ The collection gives a retrospective understanding to Hughes’s entire body of work, that he was in many ways trying to exorcise deaths that he felt responsible for. In the folkloric mode that he made his own, the condemned man must descend into the underworld in order to be transformed. Here, Hughes is plummeting into his memories, his guilt and grief. He is bringing back the brightest ore, and like a blacksmith is hammering it into astonishing new shapes.

The idea of having a ‘favourite writer’ is a bit reductive, a Top Trumps approach to literature that denies what makes any writer most engaging. Different writers, different books, provide different experiences, and it’s the collective, multivalent voice that most attracts. I could no more take only one book to a desert island than I could take nothing, but if I was forced to choose then perhaps this hardback of Ted Hughes’s collected poems would come with me. He is the complete writer in terms of how much he has infiltrated my imagination and affected the way I view the world, both outside and inside. He is not just a poet or a critic, but a vehicle for the English language, a storehouse of all its richness and power, recharged from the abyssal wellsprings of myth and folklore. There’s something almost autochthonous about him, and his voice is woven through all the thickets of my obsessions and interests. Like Martin Amis (his antithesis, in many ways), he writes with originality, euphony and force of expression; for me, the triumvirate of aesthetic virtues. Michael Hofmann, another poet and critic I revere, boldly said that Hughes was the greatest English poet since Shakespeare. Appropriately, the one book of his I haven’t read is his incredibly idiosyncratic 1992 critical study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I plan to read it this summer, and perhaps then, once I’ve absorbed everything by him, I’ll move on from my Ted Hughes obsession. But I suspect not.

‘There is no better way to know us/Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.’

Friday, 14 February 2025

Publication day, and a book launch

 Thursday 13th February 2025, a day that shall live in infamy...

Yesterday my debut novel 'The Unrecovered' was published, and we had the book launch at Golden Hare Books in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. (A short informative sentence that encapsulates pretty much everything I've been working towards for about 25 years.)

In the afternoon my editor Alison took me around various bookshops to sign stock (which made me feel like a proper writer) and then in the early evening we headed to Golden Hare.

Mary Paulson-Ellis was the best chair I could have hoped for, an incredibly astute reader who steered the conversation into very interesting terrain. It's a strange thing to discuss your work like this, because it forces you to examine much of what is either inchoate or intuitive in your writing, teasing out themes or correspondences of which you might not have been consciously aware. I also did a short reading and fielded questions from the audience, and the hour was over much faster than I thought it would be. It was great to catch up with old friends and to see the novel firmly launched into the uncertain seas of literature. And then to start drinking heavily afterwards.

I have heard other writers speak of a strange sense of anti-climax once a book has finally been published, but it definitely feels like a point of culmination for me, having spent so long trying to get here. Reviews and sales and so on are all out of my hands now, and not really worth worrying about (although obviously I hope for colossal critical and commercial success...) The reviews so far have been great and hopefully there are more to come, but the book is the thing. It's out there now, for people to spot on a table or a shelf in the bookshops, to read if they choose, or to pass over in favour of something else. I certainly hope people take a chance on it.


Wednesday, 1 January 2025

2025: a look ahead

 2024 is over, and a new year is upon us. I thought I’d write a brief overview of what I have planned for 2025, with the proviso that nothing in writing ever goes entirely to plan, and that projects I might confidently summarise here could easily be dropped in favour of anything that announces itself more forcefully to my mind. With that caveat in place…

The main thing of course will be the publication of my debut novel, The Unrecovered, on 13th February. The book launch will be at Edinburgh’s Golden Hare Books on that day, chaired (in something of a coup!) by Mary Paulson-Ellis.

Tickets for the launch, redeemable against a copy of the book, can be ordered here:

https://goldenharebooks.com/products/the-unrecovered-launch-event-with-richard-strachan-thursday-13th-february-2025

Pre-orders for signed and dedicated copies are available here:

https://goldenharebooks.com/products/the-unrecovered-by-richard-strachan-signed-and-dedicated-pre-order-13th-february-2025

And here’s a link to various other places where it can be preordered: https://linktr.ee/richstrach

It goes without saying that I’ve never had a book launch before, although I’ve been to plenty of them in my time. To say that the prospect fills me with raw terror would be an understatement, but I’m just pushing all the anxieties to one side for the moment. Hopefully it can be something I’ll actually enjoy once it’s up and running. Either way, I will finally have a proper novel out there in the wild.

 

Other than that, I’ll have the general round of edits to do on my second novel. I submitted the third draft in mid-December, and no doubt there will be lots of work to do on it during the year to get it into shape. It’s changed quite a lot since the first draft, but I’m comfortable with where it sits now.

I’ll also be trying to finish the first draft of a third novel, the final volume of a tentative thematic trilogy all about war, British history, archaeology, landscape and myth. I made a pretty good start on this in the second half of 2024, and hopefully I can get this into some vaguely completed form by summer 2025. After that there will be the usual rounds of intensely self-critical editing and redrafting etc before I can submit it.

Assuming that all goes to plan (see above), I want to spend the second half of 2025 looking over and redrafting a novella and some short stories for a possible collection. Most of the short stories have been published before, in various magazines, but the novella is something I’ve never managed to place anywhere. I’m intensely proud of it all the same, it’s like the distilled essence of every subject and style I care about the most. It was around 60,000 words the last time I checked, and ideally I’d get it down to about 35,000. The collection would be a bit more formally experimental than the novels I’m currently writing; less character and plot, more style and imagery.

On top of that (and already this seems a ridiculous amount to try and pack into one year), I want to start some very early sketches and notes towards a short novel I’ve had percolating in my head for a while. Again, this would be a more formally experimental piece, but of everything I can dimly perceive in the future it’s the work that’s most insistently demanding my attention. I wouldn’t start work on it properly until 2026, assuming my interest in it doesn’t flag, but I want to start outlining and researching and thinking about it when I’ve got the time.

 

Of course, none of this takes into consideration the usual unexpected life-events that always throw your plans off-track, and I’ve got a few events pencilled-in around the publication of The Unrecovered which will take up some time. But if I can get into a pretty steady work rate, I think much of this will be achievable. I’ll look back over it on New Year’s Day 2026, and that hollow laughter you’ll hear will be me contemptuously scorning my optimism…